Perspective: Warnings, lessons from prisoners of war

MARIE COCCOSyndicated Columnist

Published Thursday, April 22, 2004

WASHINGTON -- On April 20, 1965, Phil Butler was piloting his A-4 Skyhawk on a night reconnaissance flight over North Vietnam. The young naval aviator's job was to detect and target supply routes, and the road below him provided a ripe opportunity to hit an enemy truck convoy.

"As soon as I released the bombs, everything exploded -- the bombs, the trucks" and his plane, Butler said in an interview. He ejected safely and managed to evade capture for four days. He ran at night. He stayed low during the days.

Then he was taken prisoner.

He was starved, beaten, tortured with ropes, deprived of sleep and worse -- Butler will not now, these many years later, provide more detail.

He was released on Feb. 12, 1973, and was awarded two Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars. He remained in the Navy until 1981, retiring as a commander and then starting life over as a motivational speaker and organizational consultant.

It is an accident of history that on Tuesday, precisely 39 years after Butler was downed and doomed to the hell of captivity in North Vietnam, the Supreme Court heard arguments on another set of prisoners, in another war. The high court is to determine whether the American judicial system -- or indeed, any law -- applies to the Bush administration's confinement of about 650 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The administration asserts that the president alone has the sole power to declare these individuals "enemy combatants" in the war on terror.

That the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war -- they require that a tribunal be held to separate POWs from civilians caught up in the maelstrom -- don't apply. That some detainees might eventually be charged in special military tribunals, but others may be held indefinitely without charge.

That only the president -- not Congress, nor any court, nor the international conventions to which the United States subscribes -- has any authority over them. And once the president decides, no one can review the edict.

Most detainees were picked up in Afghanistan but others were shipped to Cuba from Pakistan, Bosnia and other fronts in the war on terror. They do not have access to lawyers. Most have seen neither specific charges nor any evidence against them. Some contend, through family members, that they are not terrorists but bystanders swept up by U.S. forces or by regional Afghan warlords trying to curry favor with the Americans. And, according to a brief filed in the case by 175 members of the British Parliament, some were sent to Guantanamo after being detained in countries as far afield of the war zone as Zambia.

No one has charged U.S. authorities with physically abusing prisoners at Guantanamo, only with abusing the Constitution and international law and indeed, the history of Western civilization. It is a history formed by the citizens' demand for human rights and the rule of law as counterweights to the unbridled authority of kings.

Butler is one of many former POWs -- others have filed a brief challenging the administration's position -- who believe that the U.S. contravention of the Geneva Conventions in this case puts American military personnel at risk around the globe.

"Future prisoners of war -- and there will surely be some -- will find themselves in conditions similar to what I endured because other nations would say the United States does not conform to the Geneva Conventions, which it signed and is obligated to respect," Butler wrote in an unpublished opinion piece.

Butler, who is retired and lives in Monterrey, Calif., wrote the article in a moment of anger. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups fighting the Bush administration in court, tried to get several major newspapers to print it. None did.

We ignore his warnings, and that of the other former prisoners of war, at our peril.

Our contempt for the rights of others can only breed contempt for our own military men and women. It can only breed contempt for the American argument that we're trying to bring democracy to parts of the world that grope in the darkness of autocracy.

And, the brief of the members of Parliament says, "Unchecked power always begets the greater exercise, and probable abuse, of that power."

And so now is the hour for the Supreme Court to meet its responsibility.

It must provide a check and balance to this dangerously unrestrained use of presidential power.